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Justly Desired and Inspiring Awe
By
Savannah Schroll Guz, Apr 03, 2008
It was not until Frank McMaster watched the murderer Joshua Abrams shuffle into the courtroom in shackles that he
began to dissect the anatomy of his own marriage. Abrams had murdered his wife, consistently maintained his
innocence, and stonily refused both sentiment and indignity. As the court deputy, Frank heard stories. He heard
that Abrams received cards daily, that he was offered an outpouring of emotion from sympathetic women, lonely
women, desperate women. He received panties, pubic hair clippings, nude photographs, marriage proposals.
In court, Frank studied the man’s expressionless face, searching for what it was that tripped the switch of
desire in these women, and a weak light dawned in his mind. Abrams’ profile was clean shaven and much thinner.
Time spent in custody had already melted a good thirty pounds from his frame, and he looked younger, about the
same age as Frank’s son might have been, if he’d had one. The longer Frank looked, the more he felt a peculiar
tug at his memory, at his consciousness. Christ, he thought as he continued staring, I passed that man
in the grocery store before Thanksgiving. With this sudden recognition came a warm flood of imprecise
memories: he remembered him because of her. How plump she seemed to him, yet how pretty. He
recalled wondering what it was like to live with a woman like that, a woman who seemed so certain, so
affirmative. He felt even more deeply for her now. She must never have smelled it. Some women simply aren’t
born with the olfactory nerve that detects the unhygienic odor of duplicity.
In the store, he remembered watching Abrams amble on behind his wife, dragging his feet like one already
condemned. Still, he betrayed no other evidence of discontent. He smiled in a tired way when she turned to speak
to him. The officer vaguely remembered that she had asked Abrams if he thought three bags of cranberries would be
enough. Like any other wife, like any other marital exchange. Yet her fate was, doubtlessly, already decided at
that moment. Seeds of malevolence had germinated even in the low light of uncertainty. Perhaps Abrams had even
considered the most effective way to dispose of her body as he wandered on behind, carrying the plastic basket,
lifting it for her as she added cans of creamed corn and candied yams.
Frank reflected on how dark his own life had become, how narrow. There was the inevitable descent into monotony,
the evenness of the days becoming not a comfort but a hardship. And his mind dug itself ever deeper into the
mucky bottom of unresolved problems, obstructing his perceived routes to freedom. At the end of each day, he came
home to his wife’s bland, oatmeal-soft features, which gazed with formless attention into the pages of a Soap
Opera Digest. She had not changed her hair color in twenty years. She never painted her nails. She never wore
perfume. She had once been pretty in a slight, mousy way, but she was not exciting and never had been.
He sometimes wondered what had attracted him to Glenda in the first place. He honestly couldn’t remember. They
had met in high school, during all the exploratory groping and pulling, during the period when boys engaged in
intimate transactions had believed they would not mean forever. What they played was an ecstatic form of
gambling, adamantly believing every time that the odds must be in their favor. We’re all right. I pulled out in
time. One never imagines they’ll get caught. But he had. And still, he had no children. There had been no
miscarriage. She’d simply been mistaken and was certain of this only after vows were exchanged. Frank had been
trapped. However, he did not blame or despise her for this at the time. It was a rite of passage to marry. A man
needed someone to feather the nest while he went out hunting, gathering, and earning. The gleaming novelty of
adulthood, of playing house, had not yet worn through. It would be just about a year before the lead had begun to
show.
And there had never been any children. They’d tried. But it had never happened, and then they had stopped trying.
Now, he came home to only her, and her crossword, and her broiler pans of chicken still knotted with yellow skin
and mottled with grease. No children tumbled at his feet or grabbed his knees in elated greeting. Nor was there
pubescent sulking at the dinner table, no heated battle of wills that made one realize with concomitant fright
and pride that their generation was being challenged and passed by. No, there was just Glenda in dark blue
polyester pants and a woman’s pink button-down shirt, the tail hanging out over an elastic waistband visible just
behind it. And through the years, he had not strayed, even though all he could ever look forward to in the
evenings now was a can or two of beer. But perhaps—perhaps!—this was all he could ever handle anyway.
No, he thought. That’s not true. Give me something more.
At dinner, several nights after he’d studied Abrams’s profile and experienced that staggering moment of
recognition, he and Glenda sat in silence over plates filled with succotash, instant mashed potatoes, and
warmed-up Salisbury steak, which lay in small, congealed puddles of grayish-brown gravy. In the arrangement, in
the steaming mound of potatoes, corn and carrots, Frank saw the shape of death—a druid hooded cloak, the arc of a
sickle. He looked sharply away, squeezing his eyes tightly closed.
Within a few days, Frank had separated himself from the man who lived in his house, showered in the pink and
burgundy bathroom, slept in a bedroom with butterfly wallpaper and mint green curtains made of eyelet fabric. He
had shucked off the sedated resignation of his old life, as a growing rattlesnake does tightening skin.
And yet. There was still a lingering hope, a dearly held notion, an outwardly apparent farce. A little
light for Glenda still shone, despite her empirical patterns. This light was powered not by reality, not by
self-deception, but by a deeply desired fantasy of what could be.
“Glenda,” he began, pushing his plate away, “would you like to go to Vegas?”
She looked up from her plate, where she’d been spearing corn with the prongs of her fork. There was no expression
on her face at all. He couldn’t even tell if she was processing his question, though her grayish eyes had widened
somewhat.
“No, Frank. I don’t think I would.” She continued eating, although by her movements, he could tell the question
had displeased her. He thought she might provide some explanation or some alternative destination, but did not.
She was looking down at her plate and chewing in the ponderously bovine way that he secretly found intolerable.
It appeared that she was avoiding further discussion. Frank was silent. After awhile, he got up and left the table.
He heard her in the kitchen. She finished eating, and then cleared the table and scraped his plate into the
garbage. She washed the dishes as she did every night after dinner. She laid the table for breakfast, clinking
cereal bowls and spoons. Usually, after these tasks were done, she would come into the den with him, and they
would watch television together, a companionable silence between them. However, tonight, she went directly to the
bedroom, and when he got there after the ten o’clock news, the light was off. He undressed in the dark, fretting
over not having brushed his teeth, worrying about what might be wrong with her. He got into bed in just his
boxers. He moved towards the center of the mattress, seeking out her body beneath the covers. He thought he might
make it seem as if he’d accidentally touched her. That way, it wouldn’t appear as such a pathetic gesture of
reconciliation. It was his feet that touched her first, and she moved away from him. “Your feet are cold, Frank.
Keep them on your side.”
It took him a long time to fall asleep. He listened to her breathing, the heavy, flat respiration within her
chest, and he wondered what he might do if it simply stopped. Would he call the police and try to save her? Or
would he simply lie there until morning? Could he? Was he man enough to do that? He realized then that he
actually loathed her that much to think of such a thing. But how dare she repulse him, scolding him like he was a
child, telling him to stay on his side of the bed when he was the one who went to work every day for both of
them, while she stayed at home all day long doing Heaven knows what. Yes, he thought, Glenda was the current
that, time and again, pulled him backward, carrying him towards a destination he had neither planned for nor
wanted.
* * * *
Over the succeeding weeks, a quiet seething began in his chest. He felt its presence like a glowing ember, which
brightened now and then with each breath of silent rage. Yes, it was Glenda who had held him back all these
years, had made him the numb and somnolent man he was now. Wasn’t he always dragging her along like an anchor?
Couldn’t he have been an entirely different man without her? He looked inside to find the seeds, the
possibilities of what he could have become, but his mind was fallow. He thought only about all the opportunities
he had passed up for Glenda. Cheerless, quietly critical Glenda, who only washed her hair every other day so that
it smelled oily and gave the pillowcases, no—the entire bed—a rancid odor he did not like. Pathetic, socially
inept Glenda, who could never mix with others at the work-related Christmas parties. She always sat quietly in
the corner, her smile a thin veneer that splintered with the force of her expanding anxiety. No one sought her
out for conversation—not even the few ebullient office girls. A woman like Glenda reminded them of how life could
be: to live in a state of constant unease and hesitation, to be so unmistakably lonely and to make no effort to
hide it. It was the type of life that, the older you got and the closer your boat came to this reef, the greater
your chances were of becoming trapped there. And why steer towards it at all when your boat still seemed so far
away?
Often, there’s only a fine line separating a Samaritan and a fool. And clearly, he had been a fool. Everyone must
have seen it all these years.
One evening in October, a week before the designated night of trick-or-treating, he came home early from work
with a box full of discounted flower bulbs. “We’ll have tulips in the spring and alliums in the summer, Glenda,”
he said as he came in from the garage. “I’ll have them planted before dinner’s on the table.”
But it took him longer than he thought it would. He tore up two narrow, rectangular plots of sod and then he dug
a hole, four feet wide and two-and-a-half feet deep. Frustrated and exhausted, he kicked the box of bulbs, and
they scattered across the grass. He let them lie there.
“Frank?” Glenda called from the back door. “Dinner’s been out for over a half hour. Are you coming or not?”
He ate in silence, shoveling food in irritably. Glenda, he noticed, ate heartily as usual. Like a hog at the
trough, he thought. She paid no attention to him, as if his behavior were not out of the ordinary. The way she
lifted the rice and the peas impassively from her plate was like a lungful of air on the little ember in his
sternum. The furnace that drove his engine of loathing began to roar.
That night, he fell into a deep, almost narcotic sleep on the recliner. With fingers twitching and legs jumping,
he dreamed he was dissecting Glenda, slitting her open at the stomach to find that she was, in fact, only a
nesting doll. The real Glenda, the responsive essence, was somewhere further inside. He continued seeking the
very center, to stop her from working, but only smaller and smaller Glendas revealed themselves. There were no
arteries or veins, no organs to rupture, yet she bled with extraordinary profusion. It stained his hands. He
could not wash it off.
He awoke sweating. The afghan beneath him was damp and his mouth felt as if it were coated with sand. His head
had begun to thump painfully and his muscles ached, as if from extreme exertion. He got up, feeling the strange,
exhausted energy that tingled in each limb, and went to the kitchen. He got a jelly jar out of a cabinet by the
sink window and saw that the light was on in the garage. A yellowish beam came in beneath the door, invading the
darkness with its slender, wounding geometry. He shut it off. With two aspirin inside him, he spread out on the
sofa and slept like the dead for another hour and a half. He had difficulty getting awake.
He showered as always, and went to the kitchen for breakfast. Glenda was not there. Instead, beside his box of
Frosted Flakes was a note on the powder blue paper Glenda used for writing grocery lists. Cartons of milk and
strings of sausage appeared to skip around the perimeter of the sheet. Beneath them was a note:
I’ve gone to live with my sister for awhile. I took the Oldsmobile. It will be in long term parking at the bus
depot if you want to pick it up. Glenda.
For the first time, it appeared that Glenda’s pained cursive, which usually wove and dribbled in an ailing way,
was amazingly firm and so much like his own. He grimaced and decided his question about Vegas would be the
deciding factor for her: she had not been prepared to cope with the turn their relationship was taking, the
inevitable requirements and the demands that would be exacted. Yes, that would explain it all, wouldn’t it? If,
in the end, he had to explain it to anyone.
Frank did not know his neighbors very well. In the twenty-five years they’d lived in the development, he had
barely made a nodding acquaintance of the family either on either side. Yet, he still wondered what they might
think, if they might talk. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know whether Glenda had found confidantes in
either of the women next door, but he supposed she had kept to herself. He could only imagine her as solitary,
staying inside the house, watching soap operas, folding laundry, or wet-mopping the kitchen linoleum. She had
never shared the particulars of her daily routine with him, and he had never asked, believing that it consisted
of nothing worth sharing. As long as he had clean, pressed work shirts and dinner was waiting when he got home,
he never had cause to question her. Yet now he wondered: would anyone miss Glenda?
He went to work, but was preoccupied the whole day. He expected to be called to the phone, worried that some
noise or blatant spectacle he had overlooked would be reported. His ears pricked up each time the courthouse PA
system clicked on. Two or three times, it caught him off guard, and his heart actually skipped a beat. He passed
condemned men in the hallway, men shackled and cuffed, and he thought, nothing separates us now.
That evening, he sat quietly in front of Thai take out. He had never before had Thai food, and he did it to
distract himself. He carefully removed the hot little boxes of rice, the packages of soy sauce. Intermittently,
he cast glances at the road out front. There was no traffic, and it was already so dark, he could not even
distinguish the outbuildings and grain silos at the farm across from his development. Something inside him
finally split open, and the tension seemed to escape from his body like steam.
He checked the yard each morning. Usually, as he waited for the shower water to warm, he cast his eyes out the
bathroom window. He was always afraid that dogs would have found his bulb patch in the night. The sod squares he
planted were taking hold, even in the chill of fall. They had been fairly large pieces, and he had had his doubts
that they would survive a transplant. There was a ten pound bag of grass seed in his garage because of this.
What would happen to the house once he was gone? He didn’t know. Once he was finally missed at work, people would
drive round, knock at the door, make inquiries with the neighbors. Eventually, the house would be repossessed by
the civil authorities and sold to a new family. He hoped the family that moved in wouldn’t have children...or
dogs. Children were given to digging, looking for earthworms and buried treasure. And what a find for a child, he
thought. Something to shock their bland, suburban-nourished imaginings!
On his last morning at the house, as he locked the front door and moved towards the packed and idling car, he
took one last look at the place. There was history here now. Something remarkable had finally happened where he
stood. It might even become an infamous landmark, something people pointed to when they brought people from out
of town. “...man killed his wife there. Can you imagine? The new owners found her body in the back yard, and
now, no one wants to live there.”
Frank imagined that someday, when he’d lived enough, he would turn himself in. Yes, he would do that. Although he
was not young, he imagined the yard-stick-high piles of mail he himself would receive, the endearments and
trophies he would claim as a new inmate, walking past the very men he’d stood with at the time clock before. He
delighted in the future promise of being justly desired and inspiring awe.
Savannah Schroll Guz is author of The Famous & The Anonymous (2004) and editor of Consumed: Women
on Excess (2005). She is an art critic for Pittsburgh City Paper and a monthly columnist for
Library Journal. She is finishing up a novel in a rural hollow of West Virginia’s northern panhandle.
You can visit her at her MySpace.
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